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Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IMPULS team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • [Advice to others:] be here to work, and find the fun in the work. A lot of people found it to be work which I get but finding the humor in it like “HAHA I classified this as what?!” while collaborating with others is so important. It turns the work environment into a relaxed environment and then working through problems feels like the work but doing the other parts feels like fun.
  • I still get confused about the variety of light curves, and trying to decipher what is going on with a star by looking at the light curves and SEDs, but working together with my students and the rest of the team I am getting the hang of it!
  • [The most surprising thing was] Definitely that we all could build up the confidence in areas we didn’t feel confident in so quickly. The ability to be told “go for it, here is the task” so early on truly wasn’t anticipated and then building each other’s confidence and working collaboratively was something I didn’t expect so soon.
  • The absolute best thing about the trip was doing the light curve analysis together as a team; working and talking together about the science, our own work as teachers, and how the two relate.
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Perseverance; gotta be ok with failure and asking questions but also needing to be ok with working on the problem and beating your head against the wall (metaphorically or not) until the problem is solved or until you can put it down for the day and pick it back up. Also critical thinking and problem solving -- encountering problems is going to be common but finding out “why” or leaving some as “unknown” is pivotal; not everything needs to be finite but solving the questions even with “I don’t know but no one else does so its all speculation” is a much needed quality/skill to have. Leaving it as “meh idk and i'll just move on” doesn’t work for many problems.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS